It’s nice and all being able to assign profile pictures to your iPhone contacts, but there’s a steep price to pay if you’d like to have all, or even most, of your contacts assigned to their profile pictures. The time that you have to invest to ensure that all your contacts are pictured-up is enough to keep many people from assigning more than a handful of pictures to a handful of friends and family.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way. With the new Photo PhoneBook iPhone application (iTunes link), you can simply synchronize your iPhone contacts with your Facebook friends. Photo PhoneBook (PPB) automatically scans your huge list (12 friends is a lot, right?) of Facebook friends and imports the profile pictures of those that it thinks match up with your contacts.
The PPB iPhone app was having some growing pains yesterday as iPhone users presumably hammered the service with requests for new accounts. Today, we had a chance to try out PhotoPhoneBook and we have to say that it does it says it’ll do. And it does it well.
There are bound to be some mix-ups and mis-matches – especially if your iPhone contacts list is peppered with similar one-name listings (John, John and John S., for example) – but Photo PhoneBook allows you to choose which photos are matched up correctly and which to disregard before the application imports the photos to your iPhone address book.
Overall, if your Facebook friends list and your iPhone contacts list have any kind of significant overlap, we’d recommend the free download (iTunes link).